The ultimate goal of DevOps is to unify development and operations end-to-end. Yet, many organizations struggle to complete the full adoption journey from a single application to the enterprise level.

Tactics and challenges vary at every stage; thus, even the most promising efforts ultimately fail to scale products and services through the entire scope of adoption. The bottom line: you need a comprehensive strategy to achieve sustainable business value through DevOps.

Among our clients, many who successfully adopted DevOps applied an approach spanning four key layers of the organization structure, each with its own measurable practices that must be synced and streamlined together.

Our report provides a detailed path to guide business stakeholders through DevOps adoption and transformation, from application to enterprise.

"The DevOps journey is not merely technical; it also covers governance and metrics, tools and technology, people and culture, as well as change management."

DevOps adoption at a glance

Optimize applications

Individual applications are the consideration in DevOps strategy. All layers are dependent on solid DevOps implementation at this level.

Organize application clusters

A core tenant of DevOps is identifying dependencies among related applications and grouping them in “clusters” based on release time and strategy. Organizations often overlook this critical step.

Empower lines of business

Most large organizations are structured by lines of business, with each serviced by several application clusters and often acting as sub-organizations. DevOps must be applied uniformly among lines of business.

Align the organization

Successful organizations need cutting-edge IT supported by a culture that promotes innovation and agility. Lines of business must align with enterprise strategy and governance to build a culture that fosters DevOps adoption at every level.

Where to start? Bottom-up, or top-down?

The correct answer is, both.

Ideally, DevOps adoption should begin at higher levels to foster the proper setup of standardized governance structure, platforms, tools, processes and guidelines—all of which are to be industrialized at lower levels.

However, application teams should be empowered to “just start with DevOps” at lower levels prior to standardization, in the spirit of attaining quick wins and pilots. With basic practices in place at lower levels, the higher levels become the driving force of DevOps adoption across all layers.

Now, an organization can start and scale DevOps adoption with continuous learning.